Things have really picked up here in Santa Cruz, and punctuated by a three-day trip to the lovely beach town Jaco, I simply found myself occupied with other tasks. But here we are now! No excuses. Time to tell you a little bit more about what has been going on here, and spend some time unpacking my pseudo-sophical thoughts throughout. Firstly, things with the library are going along swimmingly. We successfully finished painting the entire building lovely shades of white, crème, celeste, and lilac. Now we must find a way to sort, organize, catalog, and label the books that we have. Considering that organization has never been my strong suit, it stands to be determined how active of a role I will play in this process. Though brilliant suggestions such as color-coded alphanumeric labeling have emerged from other volunteers, I remain the dignified Speaker of the House for the Sort-By-Size Party. In addition to our work in the library, tomorrow morning we will begin assisting 4th – 6thgraders at the local elementary school with their English classes, which I’m really excited about. Furthermore, we will be teaching these poor children science and grammar all of next week…in Spanish. As we have further engaged with the community here and become familiar faces around town, I have been thinking more about the concept of community service itself. Community service, to me, is something that seems to be inherently ironic. As my computer’s dictionary defines it, irony is “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result,” a comically apt description of my experience with ‘community service’ in Santa Cruz thus far. When I decided to spend my summer here, I expected, as any pious college student might have, that I would be working unconditionally—I knew that I was coming down here to build the library and to teach English, but had no expectations for my experience apart from this. There was certainly nothing wrong with my sole preconceived notion—a significant amount of my time here has been devoted to these service-oriented tasks—but there is another aspect that I simply could not have planned for, and was amusingly surprised to encounter, hence the irony. I expected to come down here to affect the Santa Cruz community, and suddenly found that the community was affecting me. Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to suggest that I have become a different person after having spent two long weeks here, but there is something to be said for working in a small mountain community that is far less modernized than the United States. The technology that exists here is utilized and relied upon to a much lesser extent: though kids have cell phones, for example, their noses are not permanently buried in their text message inbox; though video games exist, they are treated as a ‘special occasion’ form of entertainment. This different treatment of technology results in the community spending more time together as a whole, whether it be playing soccer, dancing, eating, hanging out, or even collaborating around hosting foreign volunteers. Today, Todd and I spent 15 minutes with a group of locals playing with a wooden top. When was the last time you saw a top, Americans? I didn’t even know how to use it. Since such a considerable emphasis is placed on family and community, inevitably, through volunteering in and interacting with the community (and genuine attempts at speaking the language), a volunteer finds him/herself integrated in a truly remarkable way—a sort of communal integration that cannot be easily found stateside. The volunteering aspect, however, seems critical in the process of communal integration. As is frequently quoted, “faith without works is dead,” and likewise, I think that service without engagement is dead…or perhaps engagement without service is dead. Recently, to provide an example, a group of Americans arrived with the purpose of simply living in Santa Cruz for six days. Despite the fact that they are harmless Midwesterners, they aren’t offering anything to the community, and as such, appear to be somewhat separate. Since there is not, comparatively, that much to do in Santa Cruz (remember the top?), if you aren’t doing something for the community, you really aren’t doing anything at all. Though these 25 Midwesterners live with homestay families, I have yet to see them around town, and have heard stories about how bored some of them are after only three days. No offense, new Santa Cruz residents, but that’s what you get for not trying to speak the language, and not explicitly valuing the community here. In my 2.5 weeks of experience, there’s just a certain social credibility that comes along with being a volunteer and not just a tourist. As a tourist, the Santa Cruz community is but a spectacle, something to be examined, scrutinized, and compared to the US; as a volunteer, the community is something to be developed, something in which to participate. Admittedly, it makes me somewhat uncomfortable to think that there even exists a socialquid pro quo for my work here, and it certainly was not what I expected. The notion of Joe America working for the greater good in a relatively impoverished country seems pretty Western to begin with, and I wonder if part of the appeal of community service is this sort of acceptance into the kind of close-knit community that has been buried under decades of modernization in the US. Am I really here to serve, then, or to experience the change, that drug most desired by college students, which comes from integration into such an awesome (in the literal sense) community? Could it not be some of both? Truthfully, I have decided, there is really no need for this discomfort. The Western notion of service somewhat falsely places the focus solely on the work itself, but cannot this work be seen as but a catalyst for genuine, focused human interaction? The only reason that community service appears to be ironic, as I have defined it, is because of the expectation that one will not in fact receive anything in return, whether money or acceptance into a community. As Rainer Maria Rilke said about irony, “Do not let yourself be governed by it.” Even if community service is, to some extent, an excuse for peoples to unite around a common cause, to exchange personal and cultural values, so what? The fact of the matter is that I didn’t only come to Costa Rica in order to construct a library; I came here to meet people like Diego—to share my unique stories with them, and to hear theirs. The service, I think, facilitates that process by demonstrating my honest commitment to this community’s values, but the change that comes is just a dramatic example of a broadening of international perspective. I strongly believe that all preferences, likes, dislikes, and even opinions are the results of conditioning. Not to deemphasize the power of individual thought, but realistically, the first years of your life, your first experiences, condition you to a certain lifestyle. The cool thing about traveling, serving, and working abroad is that these deeply embedded manifestations of conditioning are put into check. Suddenly people with different opinions, different standards for living, different sorts of food and a different language surround you, and thathas been my favorite part of Costa Rica so far, and an aspect that cannot easily be found in the more touristy areas. It is of utmost importance, I think, not to take for granted the extent to which each of us has been conditioned. I won’t allow this blog post to ramble on any further, but I urge all of you, my committed readers, to think for a few minutes about how your lives have been conditioned, and how you might seek to branch out of your own comfort. Pura vida, amigos!